


It’s been one week

by roughmagic



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Animal Death, Canon-Typical Violence, Capital Punishment, Complete, Dissociation, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sad, Spoilers, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, quietly cleaning the jenny holzer off my nose and cheeks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-10-06 06:02:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 3,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17339906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roughmagic/pseuds/roughmagic
Summary: since you looked at me, cocked your head to the side and said, “I’m angry.” Five days since you laughed at me, saying, “Get that together, come back, and see me.” Three days since the living room—I realized it’s all my fault, but couldn’t tell you. Yesterday, you’d forgiven me, but it’ll still be two days ‘til I say I’m sorry.





	1. MONDAY, SOMEONE DIED BECAUSE HE HURT ME SO I CUT HIM WITHOUT THINKING.

**Author's Note:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

He’s double-checked and probably triple-marked the ones he wants to Fulton back to base, just so he’s certain. Kaz doesn’t normally bother him about how many times he removes or replaces markers on the same things, but it’s normally not more than twice. He made a little noise over the radio like he was going to start to say something, but Venom shifted his gear extra noisily to let him know he was moving. Better not to disturb Big Boss when he’s on the hunt. 

Solitude has become important to him. Radio silence has become very important to him. He asked Kaz as nicely as he could to keep the chatter to a minimum and got a week of cold shoulders and nobody but Ocelot’s post nasal drip throat-clearing for his troubles.

He plays a lot of music, but it’s the same kind of background noise as the land and the sky is. The sea, when he’s at home. A necessary blankness. 

Anyway, there’s a kid down there with a college degree in something R&D cares about, so Venom focuses on the descent down into the valley and the way African earth smells after it rains, expansive and rich. He listens to the sound of his gear, his own breathing, the paper-thin whine of gradual hearing loss.

It’s sloppy. He gets impatient as soon as he moves, and it’s something that’s happening with more frequency these days. He doesn’t want to go through the process of lining up a headshot, of waiting to spring, not-breathing through the brief moment of surprise before the tranqs kick in. His rifle is silenced and does the job just was well. Saves on Fultons.

There’s a radio in this camp that’s not playing music, and he stops with his shoulder resting against a map of the AO to listen. It’s been hours since the rain, but he feels like he needs to shake, clear water out of his ears.

Someone is surprised to see him, and he’s been out in the field too long to move fast enough. They have enough time to close the distance between one another, but Venom is much older and much faster with his knife.

When he resurfaces, the college degree is laying there helplessly gurgling and snorting out his own blood as he drowns in it.

_“Everything alright, Boss?”_ Kaz asks, the audio fading in like he’d had to pull the mic back into position.

He should’ve recognized the man. The kid. He’d watched him take a smoke break and lose a rock-paper-scissors for the next patrol.

It’s not the first time he’s wanted a recruit and been unable to get them, whether through chance or their own choice, but it’s the first time he’s blanked out on it so completely. Lost sight of watching his own back—but, he’s still learning to do that again.

Watching himself now, with his boots planted firmly on the red earth and several dead men nearby, he thinks that if it were anyone else but him, he would worry. 


	2. TUESDAY, SOME ANIMAL DIED BECAUSE HE WAS TOO DANGEROUS TO BE FREE.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Animal death tag comes into play! This whole fic does not feel very 2019 of me, but sometimes you just gotta clear the decks before you can move on.

There’s a gun on the table and Ocelot is talking to him, and as the seconds and minutes silently tick by he starts to wish it was for him. It’s a joke of a thought, but there’s a moment that feels just like standing with the tips of his boots off the edge of a platform. A thin moment. Easy to tip through.

Eventually, Ocelot heaves a sigh that sounds remarkably genuine. For Ocelot. “I’m sorry, Boss. Truly.” 

Venom feels as if he moves, the chance to change what was happening would be lost. He stays very still and faces ahead. “There’s a vaccine.”

“It’s only effective if he’s inoculated prior to the bite.”

“Why wasn’t he?”

“Fell behind on the records. A stupid mistake.” Ocelot says it bitterly, and Venom wonders if some poor idiot in Support is going to lose his footing on the stairwell in the next week. That’d be a bit blasé for Ocelot, but grief makes people funny.

“He was licking a wound for a while.”

“Wouldn’t let you see it?”

“He can be fussy.”

“He _could_ be. He’s not anything, anymore.”

Venom gives Ocelot a look, tired. Depersonalization is ham-fisted and they both know it, but the interrogator is running out of tools Venom hasn’t seen before. Ocelot isn’t looking at him, instead staring into the middle distance. Maybe this was less for Venom’s benefit than it was for Ocelot’s, and horribly, that’s all it takes.

He stands up. His body is on autopilot, taking the handgun from where Ocelot had left it on the table. It’s standard issue, not silenced. He had known Venom would have his tranq pistol, and he had known that it wouldn’t be enough. 

_I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this._

He feels as if he’s lead, dark and heavy, soaking in radiation. It feels like he must be moving too slow to telegraph his feelings, but Ocelot still puts his hand over Venom’s gun, folds it up in soft red leather. “I can do this for you, Boss.”

“Get out of my way.” He has no energy to say it harshly, and no need. Ocelot understands, placing the offending hand briefly on Venom’s chest, before moving aside.

The tenderness would almost always be welcome, and as much as he wants to bring Ocelot’s hand back to himself, press his mouth against his fingers until his cheek is cradled and they face one more cruelty together, he isn’t thinking about it. He knows Ocelot would indulge him, but he thinks more about the last outbreak.

A shocking thought crosses his mind that _No one helped me go through the Quarantine Platform, but he’s willing to put down a dog for me_ that feels like a slap in the face. It feels terrible to think of DD that way—he isn’t _a_ dog, he’s his dog. He’s seen him grown up. He owes him his life a dozen times over. This is a random unkindness to the memory of a friend that he has to say goodbye to. Grief isn’t rational. His brain is sending up emotional fireworks, signal flares for help or relief.

Ocelot doesn’t follow him into the next room, where the largest and angriest wolf Venom has ever seen lunges at the bars of a cage too small for him, nails scrabbling on the tiled floor. Venom closes the door behind him, to spare Ocelot any further upset.


	3. WEDNESDAY, A THIEF DIED SO EVERYONE WILL KNOW TO RESPECT PRIVATE PROPERTY.

Every PF wants what the Diamond Dogs have, and they never stop trying to take it.

Venom tries not to imagine the future of it, growing even older and spending every waking moment fending off intruders and fortifying security.

The Security team caught this one, but he’d told them to cancel the base-wide alert and let him take care of it. Don’t let the intruder Fulton off anything or hurt anyone, just let him think he’s being competent.

Venom has very rarely wanted to hunt another human being, but he sees this thief in the night and takes his time. The temptation to make someone else the outlet for the dark sea both inside and surrounding himself is strong, but he’s moved past it before. It’ll wash over him again.

It’s almost routine when he slips up behind the man and disarms him, dragging him back and knocking him off his center of gravity. He’s done this a thousand times and he’ll do it a thousand more, and the brief desire to slit the struggling throat underneath him always passes.

The man is young, unfamiliar insignia. He smells of some other base and sounds very American when he cusses and grunts, trying to throw off Big Boss. He doesn’t. He might be good and that’s why they sent him, or he could be expendable and they wanted to get rid of him. Mildly, Venom thinks that he might be useful. 

Gradually, the man stops moving, and his grip at Venom’s arm goes slack. He counts the rest of the way to the standard fifteen, and his arms don’t unlock. He is seized by the inevitability that he is so unbelievably angry that he finally cannot pull back. Every heartbeat of this does more permanent damage to this young man, but the fury never burns down into fear or guilt like it has in the past.

He constricts further, impatient for the sixty seconds it takes to kill someone in a choke hold.


	4. THURSDAY, SOME POLITICO DIED BECAUSE HIS IDEAS WERE CRAZY AND TOO CONTAGIOUS.

He doesn’t remember the briefing, he doesn’t remember choosing his loadout, he doesn’t remember dropping into the AO, he doesn’t remember setting up on the position on the ridge overlooking the airport. It was reflexive, the way that showering sometimes is, or conversations. A stretch of time where his body was trusted to do the right thing, and it did.

Venom considers trying to willfully sink back into absence, to see how far he can go on instinct. It bothers him less these days to consider that his body might be separate in some fundamental way, since he can feel his mind delineating itself. Like the quilt work of farmland seen from an airplane. Shapes dictated by rules he can’t remember or doesn’t care enough to question.

_“You’re in position, Boss?”_

“Sure.”

_“Sure?”_ Kaz echoes, with a voice like the smell of acetone. _“Are you, or aren’t you? This is an important job, pull back if you’re not in the right frame of mind.”_

He says something else after that, but Venom leans his cheek against the sniper rifle’s barrel and stares through the scope at a man he’s seen before and doesn’t know. Maybe it’s something in the cut of his suit, or the way he shakes hands, but he seems even farther away than the distance he’s currently at. Worlds away. Lifetimes away.

He watches himself from somewhere like above or behind where he thinks he should be, where he can remember being for a very long time. Where he normally is in his best moments. He soothes Kaz and lines up the shot, and the Venom watching himself do this thinks that Quiet would’ve done it better, and the Venom pulling the trigger does it too early to be truly on the mark. The man in the suit that had stepped off the plane to shake hands with whoever it was still goes up in red and the alarms start and Venom still moves back towards the jeep parked in the bushes, while also thoughtfully trailing behind.

Kaz thunders at him to turn the key and start driving about the time Venom catches up with himself, and there’s a brief car chase and some shooting. On the ride home, he finds himself sorting through the event and noting where he was and where he wasn’t. What he could do better next time, because there would be a next time.

It would’ve been nice to bring D-Horse, he knows he would’ve been present if there had been another life out here he was responsible for. It doesn’t really matter. Whoever the man was, he was dead, and Venom could relisten to the mission debrief if he wanted to find out who he had shot.


	5. FRIDAY, SOME RAPIST DIED BECAUSE HE LEFT HIS VICTIM WISHING SHE WAS DEAD. HE HAD TO DIE WISHING HE WAS ALIVE.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Referenced non-con/rape tag is active starting in this chap.

Hungry Marmot wouldn’t have come to the commanders herself, so for most of the emergency interview, her bunkmate does the talking. Bloody Gazelle’s hurt and rage on behalf of her friend, her sister Diamond Dog, feels like the waves of heat coming off a fire to Venom. She has the cadence of someone who is furious and standing up both for her friend and for a part of herself that had no one to speak for it when words were needed.

Venom mostly watches Marmot, eyes down, face puffy from tears. Canary from Medical knocked quietly and handed Ocelot a medical report halfway through and she finally shifted, just to wipe her face with the back of her hand. Ocelot sits back down next to Venom and slides him the report, which turns into sad jargon and things he already knew, before dissolving into white noise. He’s got less of a head for paperwork these days.

On his other side, Kaz is listening and sometimes trying to talk to Gazelle, who isn’t having it. Venom feels like he can see what she wants: all three of them to stand up and cast judgement on Razor Pelican and then somehow fix everything for Marmot. He wants it too, but he has no idea how to get to the important part—fixing things for Marmot.

“I don’t know what else we can do,” Gazelle says, voice starting to fray at the edges. “We went to Medical, I know the security cameras will say exactly what Marmot told me, I just—what are you going to _do?_ ”

It hangs in the air before Kaz snatches it too quickly, a man waiting for his chance to speak. “We’re going to handle it—obviously, Pelican will be punished. I’m sorry that it got to this point, we’ll do whatever we can to make sure it doesn’t happen again. We can only move—”

Gazelle stands up, the folding metal chair shuddering on the floor behind her. Her fists are balled and there are tears in her eyes that belong to Marmot. _“DO_ SOMETHING!”

“Gazelle.” Ocelot puts a hand on her shoulder and grips with an intensity beyond comforting. “Is this what’s best for Marmot right now?”

Marmot’s hands are gripping onto the slack in her uniform with the desperation of a drowning person. Gazelle relents, even agreeing to leave the room for a moment while the three of them talk to Marmot.

“I meant what I said,” Kaz says, quietly. Earnestly. “He’s going to be punished. Dismissed. We’re going to make sure this never happens to anyone here again. You and Gazelle were right to come to us.”

She has the thick voice of someone who has been crying, who is still crying, and who wants to keep crying. “Yes, sir. Sorry for the trouble.” 

He makes a little pained noise, like he wanted to tell her not to apologize, but thought better of it. “He’s being held in the brig. The dismissal paperwork won’t take long, I’ll finalize it tomorrow. For now, you should--”

“No,” Venom says, knuckles resting near his mouth in thought. The word is a rock tied around Pelican’s ankles, and Marmot looks up for the first time. Kaz’s face moves behind his shades and Venom knows he’s looking at him, that he dislikes being contradicted in front of the staff. Especially on matters of justice. Still bitter about Emmerich.

“Then what, Boss?” Kaz asks, archly.

“He doesn’t get a trial. We make an example of him." 

“I’ll put in an order for R&D to develop some stocks and weapons grade tomatoes.” Kaz says it with a straight face, and it would’ve been a decent joke in another situation. Marmot’s shoulders move briefly in a cringe. “We should establish a visible, hardline policy for assaulting a fellow Diamond Dog, something in _writing_. If there was a clear-cut rule, publicized more aggressively with severe consequences set up before this, it might not have even happened.”

“You’re shutting the door after the horse’s gotten loose, I’d say,” Ocelot murmurs.

That’s only going to provoke an argument, and Venom starts to develop a headache at the thought of it. He resists the urge to rub his face or hang his head, instead staying very still. “After this, you can write any rule you want, Kaz. Marmot gets to decide what happens to him.”

The very analytical part of himself that seems to be quieter these days pipes up to remind him _that this is putting a lot of pressure on someone who’s just undergone a terrible trauma. You’re making her responsible for whatever happens to Pelican._ But Venom can’t imagine taking the decision out of Marmot’s hands. He _can_ imagine it, of course, he can imagine the man you trust with your life deciding what to do with it, what’s best for you, and he doesn’t want to do that to Marmot. He is making a decision to avoid making a decision.

Marmot swallows thickly and seems visibly aware of being on a time limit. There’s nothing he can think of to say to convince her otherwise. “I don’t want him to be a Diamond Dog. He made me wish I wasn’t, and that—this is _everything_ , to me. I don’t want him to be here, or to see him, I don’t want to remember, I don’t—” She breaks off, shaking her head and covering her mouth.

Venom reaches forward to put a hand on her shoulder and stops himself, retreating under the watching eyes of Kaz and Ocelot. He doesn’t want to make her flinch back from a touch she doesn’t know is coming, doesn’t know that she might reject. He doesn’t want to give himself the chance to imagine her dealing with this, someone he has sworn to honor and protect feeling alone and unsafe in the middle of the ocean.

His hand curls into a fist quietly, as he stands. “Ocelot.”

“Leave it to me.”

He tells Marmot to find him if she wants to talk and she nods, before he leaves. He can’t get far without Kaz behind him, at his full and most uneven gait.

“Snake!” He’s almost out of breath when he finally catches up, and his voice bounces around the interior corridor. “I don’t disagree with your decision, but to put Marmot on the spot like that-- couldn’t we have talked about this?”

Venom looks at him and regards the unusual offering to talk, maybe even reasonably. He thinks vividly of Kaz telling him if he brings Quiet back to the base, he’ll just have her killed. A laser sight crawling over his chest. “No.”

“Is that all you can say anymore? No?” Kaz shifts his weight to duck back into Venom’s gaze, chasing him. “I’m not trying to undermine you, I’m trying to help! What’s going on?”

Nothing is going on. Venom is being the man he’s always been, and he watches it spread over Kaz’s face like an oil stain as he looks at him. “A violent crime deserves a violent punishment. You wouldn’t deny anyone else that.”


	6. SATURDAY, I KILLED A CONDEMNED MAN SO NO ONE ELSE WOULD GET BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS.

Ocelot had spent a long evening with Pelican, but when the Boss comes to get him, he doesn’t look much worse for the wear. No missing fingernails or kneecaps, no dark, gummy holes where teeth should be, no bruises, no cuts. He’s pale, and sweated through his uniform hours ago. The yellow around the collar has been stripped out, the rest of it free of any patches or insignia.

It should have disconcerted Venom to find that Ocelot had predicted that he would let Pelican rot for a full night, that he had already decided in his heart. Moreover, that he would want Pelican relatively intact, still holding onto hope. Physically well enough to imagine that he might be kept because he would be forgiven. That was important. Ocelot’s tact is one of the few things that feels real anymore, like a comforting hand on his back.

Pelican flinches and trembles in the light of the door and as soon as his mouth opens to plead with the Boss, part of Venom shuts off. It’s as if he declined translation in the field: the language is noise with the cadence of a human communicating, no meaning received. Ocelot stands beside the door and watches Venom cut the zip ties off raw wrists, hands him a revolver as Venom passes back out the door, his prosthetic hand balled in Pelican’s uniform, mostly dragging him. His legs are weak from too long in the chair, and every step towards the sunlight out on the platform’s deck seems to take longer than the last.

He doesn’t hear Pelican’s words, only the increasing volume of them. It could be begging, it could be bargains, it could be denial. For Venom, Pelican had died yesterday, the decision living behind his ribs since yesterday. He woke up this morning with the decision, lived with it through a shower and getting dressed. Ate breakfast with it.

He thinks about Quiet. He thinks about Paz. He thinks about the people who passed through the infirmary when he was still a man and not the Boss, about Mink. Parrot. Sambar, who hung himself because the first person he told laughed. Marmot.

Big Boss shoots Pelican in plain view of everyone on the Command Platform. Paints him all over the deck with a noise like thunder, in view of God and all the security cameras.

It only takes one bullet, and he hands the gun off to Ocelot, who has not left his side. He can feel Kaz watching him from behind a plate glass window or a monitor somewhere, and doesn’t feel anything strong about it. The mess is regrettable, but the satisfaction lets him drop everything for a moment and just grieve for Marmot. Somewhere, there’s a part of him that he can untangle that will think of something constructive to do for her, but it’s all written in a foreign language for the moment. 

Ocelot makes a lot of eye contact with him, probably looking for instability. There’s no way he won’t find it, so Venom stares back.


	7. SUNDAY, I RESTED.

He sleeps for a full sixteen hours, losing track of sunrise and sunset. He wakes briefly in darkness and reaches out for DD, waiting for a wet nose in his palm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	8. MONDAY, SIX PEOPLE JUMPED ME SO I CUT THEM WITHOUT THINKING.

He’s staring at the ruins, letting the sun bake into his back and scalp. He does this more and more, with the feeling that he’s acclimatizing himself to spending long tracks of time in the middle of nowhere. Kaz has consistently prodded him to be less regular about it, knowing that one day someone will take advantage of his bad wandering habit and lay a trap for Big Boss. 

Ocelot stays on the line, eavesdropping on nothing. He’s waiting for Venom to start talking about Quiet, but he may as well wait for a stone to cry. That’s the kind of patient Ocelot is, though. Unearthly. Venom has no words to talk about Quiet leaving, because she left him only a handful, and he can’t bring himself to share. He has nothing to say about DD, because Ocelot has already pried the gun from his hands and washed his face for him. He has nothing to say for himself, because Ocelot has held the filmstrip containing his past and his future in his hands and let it run out. He already knows everything Venom has lost, and he has a good idea of what he will lose.

Whether Ocelot will stay long after Kaz leaves, Venom doesn’t know. It might be easier if he left quickly, no one left to watch him transforming into whatever will be left of him at the end of this. A process that he doesn’t remember starting and doesn’t always feel occurring.

It’s almost a relief when someone lunges at him out of the bright haze of the desert bouncing off the rocks, even better when it turns out to be several someones. He doesn’t recognize any insignia on their armor, but when he gets one in a hold, it smells like someone he’d killed. When had that been? A week ago?

It doesn’t matter. Venom doesn’t want any of them. Doesn’t see the point.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We made it! Thank you so much for sticking through this experiment! 
> 
> The chapter titles are taken from one of [Jenny Holzer's Inflammatory Essays.](https://www.artic.edu/artworks/151322/untitled-monday-someone-died-because-from-inflammatory-essays)


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